ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Tracing semantic change: Approaches for tracking knowledge evolution

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-3

English Abstract

Using the conceptual framework of socio-epistemic networks, we compare local to global evolution of knowledge systems by applying two complementing methods to a corpus of scientific texts from the field of general relativity and gravitation. Socio-epistemic networks describe knowledge systems as interconnected time-dependent networks of social, material and semantic representations and aim to enable the analysis of structural developments of such systems. Focusing on the aspect of semantic representations, our first method uses information-theoretic measures to detect semantic shifts, assess their significance and allows to identify key features driving them. We complement this approach by a density-based approach on document embeddings which reveals how semantic neighborhoods change by agglomeration and dispersion of similar documents over time. We can thus trace the trajectories of documents based on content and metadata, like authorship or institutions. We exemplify our method with case studies of Joseph Silk and Hans-Jürgen Treder to illustrate the interrelation of an individual scholar's work and the broader disciplinary shifts in the field of general relativity and gravitation, highlighting the potential further extensions of this approach.

Author

• Malte Vogl, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology